Lion`s Share Of Problems In Facelift At Bally Casinos

LAS VEGAS — The former MGM Grand casino-hotels in this city and Reno have been owned by Bally Manufacturing Corp. for almost five months, but only recently have matters there come to a head.

A lion`s head, that is.

Not just any lion`s head, but the logotype of the roaring lion that has opened the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio`s movies for 60 years. The logo is inescapable at the two casino-hotels, where it`s a losing gamble trying to walk more than a few feet in any direction without passing over, under or by one.

``I have never seen so many damned lions. There are more lions here than in Africa,`` said Richard Gillman, the recently named president and chief executive of Bally`s Grand Inc., the Bally unit that operates the Las Vegas and Reno casino-hotels.

Gillman might be more appreciative if Leo were his sign and not Kirk Kerkorian`s.

In late April, Bally acquired MGM Grand Hotels Inc. for $550 million, but Kerkorian, MGM Grand`s controlling shareholder, retained the rights to the MGM name and trademarks, trade names and logos. Kerkorian`s devotion to the MGM studio was questioned this year, when he sold it and other assets to cable television magnate Ted Turner, but Kerkorian silenced the doubters by buying back the studio a few months later.

On the other hand, Chicago-based Bally showed long ago that it was no cat lover: It changed its name from Lion Manufacturing Co. in the early 1930s. Today, Bally is a $1.3 billion casino-hotel, health club, theme park, gaming equipment and lottery products company.

The trick for Bally now is to erase the vestiges of the old regime at the Nevada hotels without creating one of the worst redecorating nightmares of all time and wasting tens of millions of dollars in the process.

But Bally people here seem to be approaching the task in a laid-back fashion.

One deadline passed almost unnoticed. The MGM Grand signs that are at every entrance and along the sides of the hotels were to have been removed 90 days after the sale closed, or by July 25. They have yet to come down.

The Las Vegas hotel`s giant marquee along Las Vegas Boulevard--``the Strip``--is still topped by the MGM Grand name. However, along its bottom, the sign explains to passersby, ``Now we are Bally`s Grand.`` Even that is somewhat misleading: Bally has quietly dropped ``Grand`` and is calling the properties Bally`s Las Vegas and Bally`s Reno.

A Bally spokesman and a lawyer for Kerkorian said the deadline was extended for a ``reasonable`` period and that relations between the two parties remain friendly.

If Bally hasn`t moved faster to make changes at the Nevada hotels, it`s partly because many decisions were put on hold until Gillman`s Nevada gaming license was approved by state regulators, which didn`t occur until late August.

Nevada officials waited to see if Gillman, who also is chief executive of Bally`s other casino-hotel, Bally`s Park Place in Atlantic City, would be implicated in a New Jersey grand jury`s investigation of kickback charges against another Park Place executive. Gillman said he wasn`t called to testify before the grand jury, and no indictments resulted from the investigation.

While he was awaiting his license, Gillman wasn`t allowed to visit or to contact anyone at the Nevada properties, he said during an interview earlier this month.

Gillman said his most immediate concern now is improving the gaming results at the Las Vegas and Reno hotels.

The two properties are among the largest resort and convention hotels in the world. With about 2,800 rooms to fill in Las Vegas and about 2,000 in Reno, the previous management put the emphasis on the convention business, assuming it would draw gamblers from among the hotel guests.

As a result, Gillman said, the two hotels have been well above average in convention and catering revenues but below par in gaming revenues. They also are below the standard of Bally`s Park Place, which Gillman claims has the best profit record of any Atlantic City casino-hotel.

Gillman said he wants to make Bally`s Nevada casinos more exciting and more attractive to gamblers, especially slot machine players. ``The slots are where we make our money,`` he said.

Gillman said Bally hasn`t decided whether to replace the hotels` movie motif with another theme or a new color scheme. He said he doesn`t want to rush into redecorating because of the size of the project and the fearful cost of fumbled starts.

Remodeling on a Grand scale doesn`t come cheap, according to Gillman and other Bally officials.

The planned reconstruction of the Strip marquee, with the addition of an electronic readerboard, should cost about $250,000. Changing the casino carpeting--with its lion heads rampant on a field of red--could cost

``millions.`` Redoing every guest room, at an average per-room cost of $10,000, could mean $28 million in Las Vegas and $20 million in Reno.